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Dear friends of GMRT, ladies and gentlemen,
On November 24, 2016, the 10th GMRT Frankfurt took place on the premises of MATRADE.
The 10th Round Table in Frankfurt was held under the motto “What intercultural differences between Germany and Malaysia lead to a loss of time in negotiations? How do you put together an optimal team for the negotiations? Which “blunders” should be avoided?” .
Mr. Badrul Hisham Hilal, MATRADE’s new trade ambassador, opened the round table and introduced himself and his tasks in Frankfurt. Great Britain is an important location for MATRADE in the EU. Due to the upcoming “Brexit”, the office in Frankfurt will take on a more important role. Mr. Badrul mentioned how important Germany is for many exhibitors from Malaysia. The fairs provide an excellent platform to meet many buyers from Europe.
The keynote speaker, Mr. Carlos Gil Mast, Senior Vice-President Strategic Projects at Evonik Performance Materials, gave us a personal talk about his two years of negotiation and life experiences in Malaysia. This was followed by a Q & A session moderated by GMRT Frankfurt Chapter Initiator Mr. Paramsothy Thamotharampillai-Göbel.
Kuala Lumpur impressed him. The city offers many opportunities to enjoy a safe life and a pleasant standard of living, as it is a “green” city.
The German delegation (4 people) was welcomed at the first meeting by a large number of employees from the negotiating partners. He immediately felt the hospitality of the Malaysian negotiating partners at the first meeting. When asked “How would you rate the skills of the negotiating partners?”, Mr. Gil Mast replied “They are well qualified and trained” He found the multi-cultural facets of the Malaysian negotiating team very pleasant.
Members of the German negotiating team were focused on facts, figures and data. Expectations were sometimes not met. As the project is being launched on a greenfield site, certain parameters are missing in order to calculate the engineering. As a lot of data was not available to the German engineers, many things were delayed.
The team from Germany was not fully aware of the importance of hierarchies in Malaysian society. In the intercultural analysis by Mr. Geert Hofstede, Malaysia has the highest positioning in the power distance dimension. This means that decisions are mostly made top-down. The German negotiating team was equipped with sufficient negotiating skills and assumed this on the Malaysian side and also missed it.
Malaysia is described by the social scientist Richard Lewis as a “reactive society”. Evonik produced many draft agreements during the negotiations. Desired changes on the part of the negotiating partner only came in the course of the negotiations.
Mr. Gil Mast described the approach of DAX companies, e.g. Evonik, as very structured but sometimes inflexible. German SMEs are much more flexible in their decision-making processes and therefore more suitable as negotiating partners with Malaysian companies.
He then answered numerous questions from the audience.
The chapter initiator, Mr. Paramsothy Thamotharampillai-Göbel, thanked the participants for their willingness to participate in the discussion. There were 11 people from different industries present. Mr. Paramsothy Thamotharampillai-Göbel informed that the German Malaysian Round Table is already established in 7 cities and every GMRT is happy about the high response of Malaysia/ASEAN interested people. All future GMRT events will be published on the website gmrt.de.
Save-The-Date: The next GMRT Frankfurt will take place on March 16, 2017, this time in Bad Soden. The host is the company Messer Industriegase GmbH. The topics will be communicated by e-mail 6 weeks before the date.
Best regards / Yours sincerely
Paramsothy Thamotharampillai-Göbel
GMRT Frankfurt
email: frankfurt@gmrt.de
website: http://gmrt.de
